"I was right there in the room when they came up with the idea that a pregnancy could be terminated retroactively once a child reaches the age of reason," says the Admiral.

Neal Shusterman -- Unwind

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Prosecutors in many places resisted retroactive application of the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama, but everyone now had new hope, including Ashley Jones and Trina Garnett.

Bryan Stevenson -- Just Mercy

So am I included in all this business, too, retroactively?

Chang-rae Lee -- A Gesture Life

If Zeus went around retroactively yanking my divine power out of all my descendants, half the medical schools in the country would be empty.

Rick Riordan -- The Trials of Apollo

It’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive.

Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid’s Tale

He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality—but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively—so that to her it had never existed.

Ayn Rand -- The Fountainhead

He disappears not only here and now but retroactively.

Don DeLillo -- White Noise

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This order is retroactive to The Day, so that any births or marriages that have occurred since The Day may be properly recorded.

Pat Frank -- Alas, Babylon

When no one volunteered a response, the priest turned to his right as if retroactively directing the question to the Consul.

Dan Simmons -- Hyperion

She would have no light burning because she would be out of the house soon, and probably some mental descendant or kinsman of him or her who had told her once that light and moving air carried heat had also told her that the cost of electricity was not in the actual time the light burned but in the retroactive overcoming of primary inertia when the switch was snapped: that that was what showed on the meter.

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

The Radicals had also proposed to make the measure retroactive and to provide for permanent forfeiture of the real estate of rebels.

Richard Hofstadter -- Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth

If a State retroactively changed the relative value of its money, it would injure the citizens of other States, kindling animosities among the States themselves.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay -- The Federalist Papers — Modern English Edition 2

And once he says it, the remark is retroactively inevitable because this was the President’s opening line of course and it gets a medium laugh but Lenny kills the bit before it begins.

Don DeLillo -- Underworld

"In fact," the Chief Elder continued, chuckling a little herself, "we even gave a little thought to some retroactive chastisement for the one who had been Asher’s Instructor of Threes so long ago.

Lois Lowry -- The Giver

It’s so retroactive that it’s radioactive!

Sherman Alexie -- The Absolutlely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

The result has been two futures-two realities if you will-one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles who rule the galaxy millennia hence.

Dan Simmons -- Hyperion

That sound was merely the sharp and final clap-to of a door between us and all that was, all that might have been—a retroactive severance of the stream of event a forever crystallised instant in imponderable time accomplished by three weak yet indomitable women which, preceding the accomplished fact which we declined, refused, robbed the brother of the prey, reft the murderer of a victim for his very bullet.

William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!

…engaged to him before she had got accustomed to having him in the house; —yes, more of courage than even will yet something of shrewdness too: the shrewdness acquired in excruciating driblets through the fifty years suddenly capitulant and retroactive or suddenly sprouting and flowering like a seed lain fallow in a vacuum or in a single iron clod Because be seemed to perceive without stopping, in that passage through the house which was an unbroken continuation of the long journey from…